Top Netanyahu aide: Hamas will have 60 days to disarm or IDF will ‘complete’ mission
Israel plans to afford Hamas a 60-day period to disarm, and if it does not, the Israeli military will go back to war in the Gaza Strip, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday.
Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs made the statement a day after the premier asserted that the terror group must give up its small arms as part of the disarmament process, including its AK-47 rifles — after some reports that the terror group might be allowed to hold onto its rifles for now.
Speaking in Jerusalem to the Besheva Group conference, Fuchs said that the Trump Administration had asked for a 60-day period, and “we are respecting that.”
Fuchs clarified that he is unsure when the 60-day period starts, but it may begin with Thursday’s Board of Peace conference.
During that time, Hamas “will have to give up all of its weapons,” including rifles, he said, asserting that the terror group’s AK-47s “will be taken from them entirely.”
“We will evaluate it,” he said. “If it works, great. If not, then the IDF will have to complete the mission.”
He added that it was a “reasonable estimate” that before Israel’s next election — which is currently set for October but could be moved up to June — either Hamas will have given up its weapons or the IDF will be in the midst of an intensive new military campaign in Gaza.
Fuchs said there were many Gaza tunnels that also needed to be destroyed as part of the process.
“Today, whoever plows the fields in Be’eri sees the sea,” he says of the Gaza border kibbutz invaded and brutalized by Hamas on October 7, 2023. “There is barely a building left standing in the Gaza Strip, but the work is not yet completed.”
A day earlier, Netanyahu said that disarmament means Hamas “must give up its weapons, not [just] its main weapons,” asserting that “the one that does the most damage is called an AK-47.”
“That’s what they used in the massacre of October 7,” the prime minister said, adding that the group still holds some 60,000 rifles in Gaza.
A report in The New York Times last week said Hamas would be allowed to keep “some small arms,” at least initially, while surrendering all weapons that are “capable of striking Israel,” according to a draft plan drawn up by officials involved in the US-led Board of Peace.
According to the report, a team including US envoys Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s Gaza envoy, plans on sharing the document in question with Hamas in the coming weeks.
IDF: Troops kill 6 terrorists from Rafah tunnels
Meanwhile, inside Gaza, the IDF on Sunday said it had killed six more Hamas terror operatives who have been holed up for months in a tunnel in southern Gaza’s Rafah, on the Israeli side of the ceasefire line.
Dozens of Hamas operatives trapped on the Israeli side of the so-called “Yellow Line” diving Gaza in accordance with the October 2025 ceasefire agreement were believed by the military to have been there since the collapse of a previous truce in the Strip in early 2025.
The IDF has reported killing or capturing some 50 of them in recent months.
According to the military, troops of the 7th Armored Brigade carried out several “significant actions” in the tunnels in the eastern Rafah area in the past week, “in order to eliminate additional terrorists residing there.”
A week ago, the IDF said troops exchanged fire with several gunmen who emerged from a tunnel in the area.
In an update, the military said that on Sunday, during scans of the area, it was confirmed that three gunmen were killed in that exchange of fire, and the bodies of six more were located after they were “eliminated as part of the operations carried out along the tunnel route.”
The IDF said it is continuing to operate in the area “to eliminate the terrorists in the tunnel routes.”
Elsewhere in the Strip, the IDF said late Sunday night that it struck terror operatives who engaged in “suspicious activity on the ground” and approached troops in the northern Gaza Strip earlier in the day.
According to the IDF, troops of the Gaza Division’s Northern Brigade identified the operatives on the Israeli side of the Yellow Line. The army said that in addition to “carrying out suspicious activity on the ground,” the operatives approached the soldiers “in a manner that posed an immediate threat.”
After they were identified, the Israeli Air Force struck and “eliminated two of the terrorists to remove the threat,” the IDF said. It did not specify what happened to the others.
Since the start of the ceasefire in October, the IDF has said it has killed dozens of terror operatives and other “suspects” who have crossed the Yellow Line and approached troops. Such incidents have taken place on a near-daily basis.
